Stopped reading about alternate WWI timelines online, now I check them out of the library in Des Moines
I used to burn 3 hours a night on r/HistoryWhatIf scrolling through half baked "what if the Germans took Paris in 1914" posts, and it was mostly noise dressed up as debate. Now I walk 6 blocks to the Des Moines Central Library and pull actual counterfactual history off the shelf, and the difference in how deep the arguments go is not close. A comment thread dies in 4 replies, but a real historian writing about a world where the Ottomans stayed out of the war gives you 40 pages of consequences. Does anyone else find the library version way better or am I just old?
Man, I had the SAME thing happen with Civil War stuff, and books just hit different. A real author has to show his work, so you get the supply lines and the politics and all the messy fallout, not just some guy going "what if Lee won" and dipping. If that makes us old, then fine, at least we're old and right.